For those of you unfamiliar with Amiga, it was a hardware platform from the 80′s using the Motorola 68000 family of processors, like Apple’s Mac. At one point Amiga had sufficient market share that when you went to the software store to buy a game, they had DOS, Apple AND Amiga sections.
The thing that Amiga brought to the table back then was multitasking like no other system offered. When you look at the Amiga Workbench (the Amiga desktop) from that time, it’s not spectacular by today’s standards, but you have to understand that it behaved much more like a modern computer than the PCs and Macs of the day.
By 1989 NeXT Computer had released NeXTSTEP, their revolutionary OS. Today’s Mac OS X is based on that operating system. NeXTSTEP had a GUI that was revolutionary, and in many ways looks as elegant today as it did 20 years ago. NeXTSTEP also spawned a huge community, and X window managers followed that emulated it’s appearance, and open source projects exist today which attempt to recreate the environment it provided.
However, unlike Amiga, NeXT had a very small group of users. The machines were in the $10k ballpark, so they primarily were making converts of university computer science students of the time.
Also, NeXT was a rather ambitious system, and it ran on the same processor family as the Amiga. The difference was that AmigaOS had a much smaller memory footprint and impact on system resources. The Amiga was much, much faster.
So, speed, a sane GUI, and a system that provided seamless multitasking when the big platforms did not, not to mention a great library of games, created a community that exists to this day. There are still many Amiga forums and community sites on the web. Amazing, because while Amiga still exists as an entity to this day, they’ve had a sordid history and have not been a viable concern since Commodore went bankrupt in 1994, 15 years ago.
Today there are several operating systems devoted to keeping Amiga alive, and a couple of really good environments for running the classic AmigaOS via emulation. Incidentally, the emulation works great, and provides a system that runs better than the real thing ever did. If you’re interested in seeing what all the fuss is about, here are your options for exploring the Amiga world:
- AmigaOS 4.1 This is the official, next generation AmigaOS. It runs on Power PC platforms AmigaOne, Pegasos II, and Sam440-EP. The first two are deprecated systems, but the SAM440 is a current design and is being produced as you read this. The SAM is a Flex ATX micro motherboard, designed for use in embedded systems. Currently it is available with a 667 MHz CPU, and also in overclocked 733 and 800 Mhz versions. The drawback to SAM is that it costs too much for what it is. $1000 for a system that uses a sub-1 GHz processor, no L2 cache, slow memory bus, and no gigabit ethernet is too much. A small, passively cooled platform for AmigaOS 4 is cool, but only the truly devoted are going to bite on that hardware at that price.
Hyperion has some big announcement coming, and everyone is speculating what it is, with a lot of the speculation leaning toward AmigaOS on x86 hardware, but Hyperion isn’t talking. Based on past history, I doubt it’s an x86 port, because that would actually bring new users to the system, something they’ve curiously never seemed to care about.
Another problem with the current state of the official AmigaOS is that Hyperion and Amiga Inc. are in court over who actually owns it, something that will eventually be decided by the court.
AmigaOS 4
- MorphOS Decade old MorphOS is an operating system for Power PC that attempts to take Amiga forward without using any of the legacy code, unlike the official AmigaOS. Technologically, MorphOS is an interesting system, using a microkernel and a JIT compiler for running Amiga classic applications. This makes it binary compatible with both MorphOS native apps and classic Amiga apps.
MorphOS has a reputation for being lightning fast, and it recently beat AmigaOS in a set of benchmarks on the Pegasos II platform, the only platform that both operating systems run on.
MorphOS recently lost it’s hardware partner when Genesi switched from Power PC to ARM processors. A port of MorphOS to G4 Mac Mini is imminent, but no future hardware plans for current systems has been announced. MorphOS will run on Pegasos I & II, Open Desktop Workstation, and Efika, all deprecated systems that were produced by Genesi.
MorphOS 2.3
- AROS AROS has been around since 1995, and development has been very slow. However, thanks to Icaros there is now an easy way for users to get what is running up on a virtual machine, or on real hardware provided your gear is supported. AROS is your only path at this time for natively running an Amiga-like operating system on Intel hardware.
AROS intends to recreate AmigaOS 3.1 from the ground up using no legacy code. It is source compatible, meaning that source code that will compile on an AmigaOS 3.1 system will compile on AROS, but it will not run classic Amiga binaries. An integrated UAE port will handle this in the future. Icaros is not quite ready for primetime, but it does have usable mail clients and a modern web browser. Developer and user interest seems to be increasing, and I have high hopes for AROS.
Icaros Desktop
- AmigaSYS Provided you have a suitable ROM and an AmigaOS CD, you can run a very nice AmigaOS desktop on your PC via emulation. AmigaSYS is available for AmigaOS4, MorphOS, classic Amiga, Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and Xbox.
See what all the fuss is about by running the original system. I have this on my Mac, and it’s a nice desktop.
AmigaSYS
- AmiKit AmiKit is the king of classic Amiga desktops. Available for Windows and linux. Integrates software not available for download, it presents an AmigaOS desktop that looks really good, and runs very well. Not available for Mac, so I screwed around with the linux version half the morning and finally got it working well on my Mac. Really nice desktop, and using it you can really see why these Amiga guys are so loyal to the system.
AmiKit
I will say that the emulation of a classic Amiga is better on Windows than on Mac or linux. You can install AmiKit on a Windows box in just a few minutes. I spent about 2 hours getting it to work properly on the Mac, which in all fairness it wasn’t designed to run on. Both AmigaSYS and AmiKit run very nicely on a Mac or a linux box once they are set up, it will just be easier for you Windows users as the emulation and the install are nicer and easier on Windows.
I will keep looking for a deal on a Pegasos II that is too good to pass on, and I will continue to keep an eye on the Amiga community to see where it’s headed. In the meantime, emulation is excellent, and it will give you the answer to why there is still an Amiga community at all: it was and is a great system, and is a blast to use.
